


Drabbles

by TwistedWillows



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-19 18:05:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16539506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwistedWillows/pseuds/TwistedWillows
Summary: He’s used to it now, but he wasn’t at first.A small, incomplete drabble about the loneliness of life as your dead clone.





	Drabbles

**Author's Note:**

> So, disclaimer: I don’t know a ton about Rick and Morty. Mostly this is just me using these characters to explore the surrealism of taking up residence in a parallel universe, especially as a replacement for yourself.  
> To be honest, I’m not even mildly in the fandom. I’ve seen... most of(?) the episodes and while I really enjoy the characters and I’ve liked the episodes I've seen, I haven't really gone in order and it's been awhile so these characters might be a bit OOC.  
> I know that at this point Morty has seen so much shit that he most likely doesn’t even notice these kinds of things, but in the beginning, I imagine that he would’ve. So I imagine this takes place somewhere after the events of the kronenburg episode. 
> 
> These are unfinished notes, but I don't think I'm going to finish them, so I leave this to you, internet. Enjoy.

He’s used to it now, but he wasn’t at first. 

“Mom, do I look… different, to you?” Beth looked at her son cross-eyed for a moment, just to double check.  
“Different? What do you mean?”  
“Like- I don’t know. Different… from how I looked last month?” Beth frowned. Her eyes narrowed and she gave Morty a hard glance up and down once, before raising a suspicious parental eyebrow.  
“Well, unless there’s something you’re not telling me about, like some alien eye implant you’ve put in my head to hide something that you and your grandfather know I’d be angry about,” she said this as if she almost expected him to have done exactly that- “you look fine to me. Is something wrong?”  
“N-no! No, no nothing! I was just asking, that’s all.” 

It was subtle, usually. At first he had nightmares, then as time went on he could get through most days, even weeks, without feeling that strange drop in his stomach or the sharp tendrils of anxiety slowly poking up his spine. He knew that one day those too would be gone, the room which was meant to be his- which was his, he reminded himself, would eventually feel like his. 

Still, there were differences.  
“Hey mom, do you remember that time last week when you wore the purple shirt to work and it had a stain on it? And you took off your scrubs and your boss thought it was blood and passed out?” Morty sprung this on her in the kitchen, a knife in her right hand as she chopped peppers for dinner. Beth looked at him, frowned and thought for a moment.  
“The ketchup stain?”  
“Yeah!” Beth laughed.  
“I do remember the ketchup stain! But I think you mean my green shirt, Morty.” 

 

It felt weird, calling his parents his parents. 

 

Admittedly, Jerry was not good at many things. What Jerry was good at, however, included being suspicious of his wife and all of her interactions with other males of the same species and otherwise, confusing sidebar clickbait for genuine opportunities for employment, and interrupting at the worst possible time. Case in point:  
“Hey, what’cha up to champ?” Morty slammed shut his laptop.  
“Gah- dad not- not now okay, I’m trying to do my homework!” Of course, Jerry invited himself in anyway, glancing around his son’s room as he entered (as if he expected it to have changed in some profound way in the last 30 minutes).  
“You’re doing homework?” Jerry asked. “Wow, I guess we didn’t do too bad a job raising you after all-”  
“Okay dad no it’s porn please get out of my room!” Jerry’s face took on a stern look.  
“Morty!” He cried, but Morty just squeezed his eyes shut and put his hands over his ears, hoping he could pretend it was out of embarrassment instead of the panic eating him up from the inside.  
“Dad I’m fourteen just- just leave me alone okay?!”  
“Morty if you think we’re not going to have a conversation about this-”  
“I think mom’s on the phone with her hot coworker downstairs!”  
“What?!” In Jerry’s confusion, Morty got up, shoved him into the hallway, and locked the bedroom door behind him.  
“Morty!” Silence on the other side of the door. Morty bit hard on his bottom lip, but then: “We will be discussing this in the morning. Beth!” And Jerry- his dad- vanished around the corner. 

Can you miss someone when they’re right there in front of you?  
Same mom and her same habits, sitting down at the breakfast table and taking one bite of everything on the plate and then taking a drink (he could’ve sworn the real- the other- mom in the other universe took a drink _before_ she tried her food, but maybe not; he never really paid attention to those kinds of things, didn’t really have a reason to).  
It made him affectionate at first. Lingering hugs, and random ones, sitting with his dad and watching whatever terribly boring thing he’d found to take a vested interest in that day. Eventually it faded. There was really no point; they didn’t understand. He almost thought about telling them one day, but they would most absolutely end his adventures with Rick, and he didn’t want that, he guessed. Rick was something constant. Rick was the only constant, it seemed, in this universe and every other one. 

 

“Rick, what if they find—them?” It felt too wrong to say ‘us’.  
“Find what, Morty?”  
“U- the bodies? In the yard? What if dad picks up gardening again and he’s digging and he hits a human bone, Rick? How are we going to explain that to my parents?” Rick rolled his eyes, still fiddling with his whatever invention of the week, and largely ignored him.  
“Then it will be the most valuable thing your father’s ever brought to this family. Relax, Morty. Jerry couldn’t find a haystack on a farm, much less two bodies buried seven feet under.” 

But if there was one thing Morty was good at, that thing was worrying, and Morty worried about it constantly, those mounds of disturbed earth, the two things slowly rotting underneath of them and what things would happen if ever his mother or sister were to happen upon them.  
Rick said the grass was growing over the spot.  
How could they not see it? The huge clump of disturbed earth, a random bump in their yard lying bare and misplaced from the idyllic suburbia surrounding it? Morty looked at it again and all the sudden it looked like there was no dirt at all, not only on the mound but surrounding it, like an infected wound poisoning the rest of the yard. He felt his chest tighten and shot a nervous glance towards his father-  
“What a nice day to go for a walk.” – who seemed completely unconcerned, whistling as he collected the mail and headed back into the house.  
Morty slid down the wall and moaned. 

 

Morty doesn’t think of it anymore. Never more than a passing thought, a bitter laugh and a breath on the wind before he does the only thing he can do, the only constant he knows across this and any universe, “Don’t think about it Morty!” So he doesn’t.


End file.
